STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Brooklyn Museum visitors are discarding all kinds of misinformation, from the spelling (tipi over tee-pee) to the idea that tipis are a long-gone practice.

Just outside the venue’s exhibit, “The Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains,” a full-sized, 24-ft. tall painted tipi raised at the museum this past winter is so pristine it looks artificial. It isn’t.

It’s the real thing, made by Blackfeet artist Lyle J. Heavy and decorated with a “bleeding buffalo skull” a motif he will one day pass down to a son or heir.

It’s new, sewn out of canvas, not tanned hide, and it hasn’t spent any time outdoors.

Tipis are not what they used to be, of course: Plains-based tribes no longer require easily transportable pre-fabricated housing. But they remain important at festivals, weddings, births, and as symbols.

In one of the catalogue essays, a Crow woman, Mary Lou Big Day, recalled the gift of a tipi from her new husband’s family. Women built and owned tipis, typically. The practice continues today, adjusted to suit the times. Buffalo robes would have furnished a well-appointed 1850s tipi.

“Today,” Big Day said, “(people use) a canvas, floor, mattress and bed springs.” She could have added that, at festivals, participants may don traditional dress, but they also use iPads and take photographs with their cell phones.

“The Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” is drawn mostly from the museum’s own 700-piece collection of Plains objects (clothing, tools, weaponry, playthings). Most were made after the Civil War, when nearly all Plains people had been forced out of their home territory and onto reservations.

But some items — mostly articles of clothing —are far older. These shirts, dresses, moccasins and leggings are often well-worn but beautifully made, with decorative porcupine quills, beads and bits of metal. Other pieces, like a plain broad spoon hollowed out of sheep horn are perfectly austere.

Questions about cultural “purity” arise readily in Native exhibitions, as they often do in other contexts. In the New World, the “contaminating” presence of Europeans began expanding in the late 1500s and 1600s.

By the 1800s, European-made textiles, like muslin, were in wide use among many native people, as substitutes for various kinds of hide. Imported materials, motifs and practices were pervasive by then. Glass beads, iron, tin, had become common.

Horses, which greatly changed life on the Plains, had been reintroduced many generations earlier by Spaniards. New World horses had become extinct around 10,000 BC

Obviously, “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” is terrific family fare. It has edgy moments, too. Native artists and craftsmen of the late 20th and early 21st century can report to the history and technique of traditional crafts, even as they appropriate contemporary ideas and imagery.

Today, craftswomen who are members of the Lakota, Sioux or other Plains groups, are free to convert traditional motifs into formats they sew into quilts, an activity unknown to their great-great-great-great grandmothers.

Or, like well-established Kiowa beadwork artist Terri Greeves, they are free to apply traditional arts in unusual contexts. She lavishes hand-sewn beads in tribal patterns on high-heeled high-tops (sneakers). This kind of work requires a sense of humor, something highly valued in Native circles.

“The Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains”

More than 160 objects representing culture & social, religious & creative traditions from the early 19th-century to the present.